The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
In the course of a project, a user will often create a large number of interrelated documents. For example, as part of a financial analysis project, a user may create separate documents analyzing each of a financial instrument group, a date set, an index created using the date set and the instrument group, a regression analysis performed on the index, and a trading strategy based on the regression.
These documents, however, are typically difficult to manage. File systems are very limited in their ability to organize, view, and label documents. Beyond placing documents in different folders in a file system, a user has no way to organize documents. Moreover, for many tasks that the user would like to perform on a project level, such as printing, updating, executing, or sharing, the user must perform the task manually for each related document, often in a prescribed order that is not reflected in the way the documents are organized within the file system. Manual performance of these tasks for each document in a project is tedious and time-consuming.
Furthermore, it can be difficult to keep track of the ordering of the documents as well as interdependencies between documents that may necessitate such ordering. A user lacks, for instance, any convenient mechanism for communicating information about document ordering and interdependencies to another user.